According to the Harvard Business Review, considering the time and resources needed when performing email marketing vs. direct mail, an email marketing campaign delivered an ROI 95x greater than that of a direct mail only campaign.

If this doesn’t paint the picture of the dramatic shift toward digital marketing and advertising, nothing else will.

However, the days of simply blasting email messages to your entire contact list are long gone, and if you’re looking to keep unsubscribes to a minimum, it’s best that you subscribe to this theory.

Says Corey Eridon, Inbound Marketing Manager at HubSpot:

“The days of blasting marketing messages to your entire contact list are, unequivocally, over. Email marketers doing this are going to deplete their lists at rapid rates, and some will even end up being blacklisted for spammy email marketing practices.”

List Segmentation

Here’s something you may already know; all leads generated on your website are at different levels of the buying cycle. Knowing this, surely you would tailor your email marketing campaign to send your leads the content they would find most helpful in their decision-making process, right?

Using the HubSpot software, you can segment your contact list by ultra-specific criteria, including:

Page views

Form fills

Lifecycle stage

Country

Emails clicked

Most recent conversion

By sending your leads more relevant content, you’ll see a dramatic increase in your email open and click rates, and as a result, your reconversions. This results in more qualified leads being fed to your sales team.

“The best email marketers are leveraging segmentation and personalization across all marketing channels,” says Eridon. “In other words, it's not just about segmenting your list and throwing in some dynamic fields in your messages -- it's about directing those recipients to web content that automatically personalizes to their interests, too.”

Email Personalization

According to Capgemini, more than 60% of shoppers say they find it appealing when an online store remembers their personal and payment information to speed up a purchase.

Lesson? Consumers love seeing you know a little bit about them. Not only does it let them know they’re not part of a high-volume email blast, but it also drastically increases their likelihood of a purchase.

Time to Ditch Direct Mail?

While direct mail is still effective in some industries, the vast majority of customers are seeing more of an ROI by switching to email marketing.

Equally as important, according to Eridon, is the ability to more effectively track the performance of email.

“I don't ever like to make blanket statements, so I'll say that there are some use cases for direct mail,” says Eridon. “I just can't really think of many in which direct mail is going to be more cost efficient than email marketing done right.

Even the ability to better measure an email marketing campaign compared to a direct mail campaign makes it easier to prove its impact, and by extension gives marketers the information they need to iterate and adjust email campaigns to continually improve performance.”

John Bonini

John is the Marketing Director at IMPACT, responsible for the overall marketing and branding strategy. He also writes for the HubSpot Blog, Social Media Examiner, and Convince & Convert among others. He enjoys playing guitar, high-fives, and anything with marinara sauce.

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